Tag: Social Justice Warrior

State of Js

I drafted up this blog a year ago but never published it.

“State of JS” do an annual survey about Javascript, and one of the questions was about people’s favourite content authors.

In the 2021 survey, 2 out of 15 of these content authors were women, and some of the “Social Justice Warriors” aren’t happy about this, so one of them stated that the chart’s title should be simply “MEN”. Then she follows it up with highlighting the demographics of the people surveyed. 71.3% were men, 4% women, 0.9% non-binary, and everyone else refused to answer.

I think her point is that men are voting for men and thus perpetuating the “bro culture” that is holding back women like her.

If we assume that the survey does represent the proportion of developers (after-all, it is well known that the software development industry is mostly men), then I would say that should be proportionate to the number of public content creators too.

Therefore, we should only really expect to see 4% of women occupy the Top 15 Content Creators list. So what is 4% of 15? Isn’t it 0.6? So really, it’s not even that farfetched to expect all 15 to be Men.

It’s possible there are more women since there’s that large number of people who opted not to specify. However, around 492 women did respond, so there could easily be more women on that list. What’s that you say? Women are probably nominating men?! Unheard of!

I only learned some Web Development stuff HTML, Javascript, Typescript, React over a short period, and if you asked me to name some creators, I’d have probably named Dan Abramov, Wes Bos, Florin Pop, and Stefan Baumgartner and Cory House. Kent C. Dodds, Dan Abramov are big names in the field and the likes of Wes Bos have a huge following, have paid content, are very active on Twitter, and have a Podcast. So you expect these names to occupy the top spots of a list like this. Is it really perpetuating an exclusive culture?

I think it is just simple statistics. There’s no point lambasting StateOfJs for putting a survey out there. There’s no point attacking the men who responded that they didn’t vote for your friends.

I’ve written about a few occurrences like this. Deep down, these people think they are doing good by going on the offensive and “virtue signalling”, but all they are doing is creating a divide/toxic culture which is the opposite of what they actually want.

Note: It looks like there are 5 women on the latest survey https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/resources/. I wonder if this is linked to last year’s outrage, or mere coincidence.

Renaming “Master” in “Scrum Master”?

During the Black Lives Matter movement, the “tech community” debated whether the “master” branch (in terms of source control) should be renamed to “main” or similar. This was then adopted by GitHub as the new default.

Recently, I wondered if the same debate was had for “Scrum Master” in terms of Agile Development. The “Scrum Master” is a responsibility to organise the Agile meetings such as the Daily Scrum aka Daily Standup. The scrum nomenclature was adapted from Rugby.

I found a thread on scrum.org which argued for and against, but the community definitely settled on keeping the name. The difference between a “master” code branch, and a Scrum “master” is that the Scrum Master is about mastery, and not a master/slave relationship. So it’s the same word but different meaning and origin.

Thank you for your input and we will pass it forward to Ken and Jeff. Please remember as Ken and Jeff have always said, the role of Scrum Master is one of Scrum mastery and not in any way related to being the owner of the team as the team is self-organizing and self managed. Scrum Master  a role and not a job title taken from the ideas of the master carpenter which dates back thousands of years.  GitHub on the other hand literally used Master and Slave meaning that one controlled the other. 

That said, a lot of things are always being discussed and considered and your courage to bring this forward is greatly appreciated.  

Eric Naiburg

I’m sometimes embarrassed to tell people what I do because of how arrogant or self-important I think my job title and role make me sound. Whether one agrees the name should be changed or not, public opinion on the word “Master” exacerbates this problem.

Simon Mayer

Piotr Górajek calls people out for virtue signalling.

I will put here a little different perspective. IMHO this is ridiculous to push for change words only for the sake of pushing for it. How do you come to an idea that one word, put out of its’ context, should be changed because of “racism connotations”? Each word have a lot of meanings

Piotr Górajek

The word master is clearly a person that masters the framework, a coach, a person that has a mastery or “expertise” on something. With this line of thinking why we do not rename the Master degrees from Universities? MSc titles should be renamed as well?

Alexander Leanza Bøhnsdalen

There’s a good amount of sense in what Alan Eustace says

I wanted to observe a couple of things.

It seems like most, if not all of us, engaging in this conversation, are white. On what basis can we evaluate the impact of the terms we’re discussing?

Changing terms/language alone will not eradicate systemic and institutional racism. And yet language and symbols are powerful. 

Language changes over time to accommodate shifts in cultural sensibilities. There are plenty of examples of this.

Personally, as I mentioned above, even before recent world events, I have disliked the term “Scrum Master” for some time. I have not found it helpful, and continually have had to explain what is, and what is not, intended by the word “master”. 

Alan Eustace

“Organizations choosing not to respond to #BLM in a productive way will cause negative perceptions ranging from being perceived as tone-deaf (best case); indifferent to institutional bias; or racist (worst case).”

Phil Bryant

I’m not sure on Phil Bryant’s view. It defintiely seems like virtue signalling, and I’d say it’s quite tone-deaf changing things that don’t need to be changed and drawing attention away from the real issues. People are protesting against police brutality and we are trying to rename Scrum Master into Scrum Facilitator or something.

Now consider a team with a white Scrum Master. Every day, the members will hear their leader referred to as their Scrum “Master” – unless we make a change. As Agile practitioners, “We value responding to change over following a plan.”

Phil Bryant

Now consider a team with a non-white Scrum master. WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT THAT PHIL!?

The problem with choosing another word is that many other words can also have some kind of offence if you really study them. Sean Hoegaarden says

Scrum Wizard will be a problem for the same reason as Master (KKK), Scrum Captain too (slave trade ships), Scrum Samurai is obviously cultural appropriation, the Scrum Alchemist has antisemitic reminiscences… I hope we will not end up with something like an Agile Clown…

Sean Hoegaarden

Can I suggest we go to the home of where the terminology “Scrum” came from – i.e. Rugby.

The key role in a Rugby Scrum is the “Scrum-Half” for example.

Mohamed Hesham Jurangpathy

Sorry, but if someone starts calling me a Scrum Hooker instead of a Scrum Master I’m not only going to be offended, but probably initiate some fisticuffs!

René Gysenbergs

In conclusion, if the name is deemed inappropriate or irrelevant by the community (and we need non-white people to be part of the decision, rather than white folk just virtue-signalling), then the Scrum community can look to change it. However, deciding on a new name that doesn’t involve cultural appropriation or cause any other offence – seems harder than first thought.

Wokeness at work

March 8th was International Women’s Day and so people at work made a few posts about it. One person made a post about “Gender bias“:

“Gender bias comes in many different forms including stereotypes, assumptions and discrimination. It can be both deliberate and unconscious, malicious and unintended – but above all, it is a common barrier to equality – both for women and those who identify as women.

Today is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the role of gender bias in the workplace and in society as a whole and how we can all become allies and support our female colleagues, friends and family members. The best place to start is with our own learning.”

Person 1

I find today’s “woke” culture quite interesting because it’s actually quite difficult to say the right thing and it’s very easy to be hypocritical. She says “both for women and those who identify as women.” which implies they aren’t equal – this is basically a microaggression. The correct thing to do is not actually point it out, and just use the term “women”. However, she then goes on to use the term “female” instead of women in the following sentence. Ironically she did call out it can be “unintended” discrimination, and the “best place to start is with our own learning.”

Another person recommended these “unconscious bias” tests https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html 

“I tried the gender and race tools and it helped highlight to me where I have to think and work on my ‘implicit associations’. These associations should not be judged by anyone other than myself (they are after all how my brain has become wired over 50+ years) – but will help me understand, moderate and change my interactions and thought process when looking at a whole number of things.”

Person 2

I gave a few of them a go. The ones I tried had the same style. The test is that there’s a group of words associated with 4 categories. You are given a pair of categories, one on the left, one on the right. You are shown one word at a time, and have to press “I” and “E” on the keyboard to assign it to the correct category.

For example: “Gender – Career. This IAT often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males.”

I think the idea is that when Career and Males are paired together on one side, and “Family and Female” on the other, then you will match the words faster because of the strong association that these words are related.

As the Result screen states:

The order in which you take the test can influence your results, but the effect is small. We minimise this effect by giving practice trials after the categories switch sides. We also randomly assign the order of the IAT so that some people get one order and other people get the reverse order.

Harvard

I do think this will have a bigger impact than they claim, although maybe it depends on the individual. When I got to the end, sometimes I thought I was submitting the answers faster because I was used to the way the test worked, but then sometimes I ‘d get the wrong answer and think it was down to the fact that I recall pressing “E” when I saw “Salary”, but then in this round, I should be pressing “I”.

I did the Sexuality (‘Gay – Straight’ IAT) test first, and I was conscious of how it was expecting me to be biased, so I focussed more and was more determined to score higher. In the end it suggested I had a fairly strong preference for Straight. I would have liked to have seen the timings because I was convinced I had scored consistently in the later rounds, or even better because I was aware of how it was trying to trip me up. I think I messed up more in the early rounds because I was getting used to the test.

Personally, I wouldn’t read too much into the results anyway.

In Defence of Brad Traversy

When I have written a few blogs on “Social Justice Warriors” in the Tech industry, I’ve chosen not to call specific people out in order to avoid backlash, but this situation has really riled me. I’ve only watched a few videos from Brad Traversy so I have no reason to defend him, but those attacking him seem very misguided. This is how I see things:

So back in June, Anastasia Marchenkova posted this:

So Hays is a guy in the tech community sending hate to a woman in the tech community. It’s unknown what triggered this, but it doesn’t matter – the abuse is out of order. Anastasia is suggesting that he was positively interacting with her by retweeting her content. If you view the full tweet, you see that her initial response to the abuse is this

“Hey Hays! This seems like a weird message from you- you’ve seemed to like my links to resources – have you been hacked”

Anastasia’s initial reaction

Remember this response. It’s key to understanding the misguided reactions.

Just like that quote, she also elaborates in the follow-up tweet

“I asked if he was hacked because we always had a good dialogue”

Anastasia

So it seems not only has Hays retweeted her content, it very much sounds like they have shared messages before too.

It’s worth noting that: if someone has been hacked and the hacker is sending abusive messages, asking if they have been hacked isn’t actually going to get a valid answer. Probably will just get more abuse back.

Brad Traversy then shows support for Anastasia with this tweet

“Such weird and incoherent messages, I would have sworn he was hacked by some low IQ incel that hates women. He has always seemed pretty chill in any interaction I’ve had with him. Maybe some kind of mental break. Unfollowing for now though. That shit is unacceptable”

Brad Traversy

So what did Brad say here that wasn’t echoing Anastasia’s thoughts? He agrees with her initial reaction of questioning the possibility of being hacked. He then mentions he has never witnessed this behaviour in previous interactions. Although he wants to give Hays the benefit of the doubt, he has unfollowed him.

But here comes the Social Justice Warriors that presumably, haven’t actually read the entire thread.

If Anastasia hadn’t made these comments herself, and Brad was the one to initially suggest them, then maybe Ali has a point that he is “minimizing” this experience. That’s not what has happened though, and Brad is being supportive.

So Brad obviously reacts to it and points out that this Social Justice Warrior and virtue signalling behaviour has to stop, because it is just toxic.

People really didn’t like Brad using the phrase “you people”, presumably because they thought he was attacking women. He wasn’t. He was attacking Social Justice Warriors, overreacting to anything. He wanted to show support for women in tech, and he has been lambasted by the people he was defending.

I thought this guy’s response was funny.

Brad responds to him with “There is a group of them that do it”. This is referring to some of her friends that gang up together, pooling their followers to collectively abuse, and even cancel someone completely. It had happened before when someone posted a joke; a tech pun based on current events. They requested all their followers unfollow this person, then contacted the CEO’s of several companies that the guy made money on, and demanded they delete his account. I could understand if he had done something really bad like committed a murder, but tweeting a joke isn’t enough to lose several sources of income. The guy could have lost his house or something.

I have even seen them respond to people that tweet “here are my personal favourite software developers” with something like “this isn’t representative of the industry because there’s no women”. If the person says “it is my list, with opinions from my experience, then they get accused of being a “tech bro”. If they back down and agree to add a woman, then they then say “what about women of colour”? Where do we stop? Do we need to list a developer from every country in the world? It was their personal tweet, you don’t have to comment on it.

Anastasia’s thread was supposed to be about Anastasia’s abuse, but Ali has then made it about Brad. Ironically, she then attacks Brad for making it about him.

The tweets have since been deleted, so I may be making this bit up, but I think Brad tweeted something on his own page along the lines of “if you are gonna cancel someone, then make sure it is justified”. He didn’t call Ali out specifically, but then she replied to it, so people then knew he was attacking her. She claimed that Brad was out of order because she would never publicly call him out. Well, apart from all these tweets I’ve linked to, which triggered Brad to make his tweet.

This stuff happened in June, but for some reason it has been brought up again as if it was some major turning point in the industry. They are acting like it is Armistice Day or something.

The intention is fine. Abusing someone is bad. Defending someone who abuses someone is bad. However, if you are gonna call someone out on it, it needs to actually be legit. They are attacking Brad when he didn’t do anything wrong.

Why is this being brought up again? It was 5 months ago. Sure, if it was a huge deal and actually accurate, it would be fine to bring it up. Brad wasn’t the huge deal, it was Hays. Surely something has triggered myraccoonhands into discussing this, so why not tweet about whatever the new situation is?

What riles me is that it’s a screenshot where you can’t see Anastasia’s original post. So now when people see this, it really does look like Brad is minimising women’s experience of abuse. Since people don’t research things, you then get responses attacking Brad.

This shows that Ali did have some success in cancelling Brad:

Check out this vitriolic tweet. When I initially saw it, I thought he meant Brad deleted his responses to Ali which is why myraccoonhands used a screenshot. But no, they used a screenshot to be deceptive. Not sure what sweetestshuga is on about with the apology. I don’t recall Brad apologising but he had nothing to apologise for.

Conclusion

I’ve personally never witnessed any hate in the workplace towards women, but I have no doubt that women do get patronised in the workplace and get abuse online. It’s out of order, but you need to tackle the problem effectively.

I think the problem with “Social Justice Warriors” is that they come across as extremists and don’t go after the actual problems. It just creates more divide.

I think it is kind of a “boy who cried wolf” scenario (probably will get in trouble for that, why can’t the girl cry wolf?), that if people falsely accuse people of being sexist; then when there is a case, it’s harder to believe them. Accusing people of being sexist for tweeting about their favourite developers (that just happen to be male), then accusing people of being sexist for agreeing with a woman’s accusations…surely the next accusation I’m going to dismiss. Then I’ll be called a misogynist and minimising the person’s experience, and it will seem like there is a case for it.

In future, Brad would be less inclined to speak up due to his experience; further perpetuating the “bro culture” that they aim to eradicate.

Anastasia described a problem with one guy who was abusive, but yet it quickly became about some other male who was an ally. Emily Kager, myraccoonhands , and Ali aren’t reminiscing about Hays awful posts to Anastasia, they are reflecting on how they attacked Brad, who was their ally.

People need to remember that if they attack people, then all their followers may join in on the attack, if they intended or not. The Youtuber The Quartering often discusses “controversial takes” and has been on both ends of that. If he is negative towards someone, he does tend to remind people not to be a lynch mob. We are merely discussing events that have happened. We are criticising the lynch mob behaviour and don’t want to create it. I only have 31 followers, but don’t go after anyone I’ve mentioned here.

Now I have written this blog:

  • myraccoonhands thinks I defend stalkers
  • wellis321 thinks I’m a prick who is not good for the industry.
  • Emily has now validated me as a misogynist
  • denvercoder will never promote my blog
  • Ali thinks I am minimising her experience

If this blog disappears, then I have been cancelled.

Social Justice Warriors and “Cancel Culture”

This is going to be a controversial one. It’s also a long one.

Many months ago, I went out seeking new development podcasts to listen to, and I checked one out that happened to be run by a group of women in the tech industry.

My opinion on the content was mixed and I did think it would be a cool idea to do some podcast reviews. However, after I wrote it, I felt that some of the criticism could be perceived as a sexist attack (because they are women), so I decided it wasn’t worth the backlash, and therefore didn’t post it.

I did listen to more episodes and I did follow some of the hosts on Twitter. However, as time went on, I saw more things I didn’t like with their behaviour.

I still don’t think it is worth naming them, because as I’ll explain, they could retaliate with their “cancel culture” attitude, and I really don’t want a tirade of abuse from 80 thousand people.

So in this blog, I’ll just refer to them as the SJW Podcasters.

Let’s just summarise some of my beliefs, so you can bear in mind as you read.

  • Yes, I do have a blog where I criticise people, but I also like to draw attention to the positives. Also, see the two points below:
  • I think freedom of speech is important, but I do draw the line when the speech incites hatred and can cause harm to people.
  • I judge developers on their code and attitude towards software development, and not by any bias of race/gender etc.

One criticism I had with the podcast is that sometimes they seemed to view things in terms of Social Justice, rather than just analysing the content. So for example, they were doing a book review which talked about differences between men and women in the workplace. They criticised the author because they didn’t explicitly mention that trans-women are women too. Surely it is implicit unless the author contradicted the assumption? However, later on they start talking about issues that apply specifically to biological females, which means their initial statement was hypocritical. Given that they spent time moaning about the author, essentially accusing them of being a trans-phobe; the podcast seemed to be more about Social Justice than it was about being a tech podcast. Also, they explicitly stated they lowered the rating of the book because it never used the word “transwoman” or any related words.

I can’t find the quote now, but I’m sure they wrote/said they will never have a male guest on their show because it takes away from the efforts of women. Surely if you want to promote equality/inclusivity, then you shouldn’t “fight fire with fire” and be exclusive with “positive discrimination”. What happens if a male wanted to come on the show to talk about how to get more women in the tech industry? Nope, we can’t have that can we?

The other day, a developer with 80,000+ followers on Twitter, posted a nerd joke which was a witty play-on-words on the Black Lives Matter movement. Obviously racism is like 10,000 times more important than trivial nerd issues in software development.

However, surely people are either:

  1. Going to find it slightly offensive, and unfollow him
  2. Don’t think anything/much of it, and ignore it
  3. Going to find it witty, and are happy people still can post humorous stuff in these dark times.

This joke was in no way racist, although you could say he was trivialising the movement. Whatever your stance, surely it doesn’t warrant drumming up hate to try and destroy his career.

One of the SJW Podcasters was extremely vocal about getting her followers to unfollow this guy, and no doubt they were also providing the negative comments towards him. I think he lost about 5,000 followers from the backlash, and got a tirade of abuse.

I’ve seen the SJW Podcasters gang up on other people for their tweets. What will happen is one of them will tweet some criticism, then the rest of them will join in, so it seems like there is bigger backlash. They did the same thing to this guy by targeting a director of a popular development tutorial website where the developer had a large presence. The director was quick to action the deletion of all his content, and banned him from the site.

Another development content provider saw the declaration of the ban, so also followed suit and also banned him from their platform.

Then they looked for his other online presences on major platforms and got him banned there too.

When this developer primarily finds work by his online presence, this is a massive hit to his career. People have flagged up other potentially controversial statements (more like Frankie Boyle style humour), so there is some argument that he could deserve it. However, why didn’t they “cancel” him years ago? Why now with a simple joke? Shows like South Park can be controversial too, but yet they address social issues with satirical comedy. They have mocked Social Justice Warriors with their character PC Principal.

Some responses were along the lines of “this guy has taught me a lot, who can I follow now?”. Someone was nice enough to respond with a list of their favourite developers. Who could be offended by that? Obviously the SJW Podcasters! He got a negative response, chastising him for his choices and dictates he needs to edit his post and include women and ethnic minorities. He did a follow-up tweet, including the members of the SJW Podcasters to appease her.

She then tweets a more detailed explanation directly to her followers. I was so pleased that this got a lot of backlash. It seemed like 70% of the responses were along the lines of “I follow developers based on merit, not their ethnicity/gender”, or “please do not tell me who I am allowed to promote”. A few high-profile developers also responded with messages along these lines. I thought they were quite brave for doing so because obviously, the SJW Podcasters were going to retaliate. “You are part of the problem” she tells them, angrily.

Absolute toxic behaviour.

The next day, I was so pleased to see that she deleted her tweet, but I was saddened when I saw the other high-profile developers having to debate with her followers that were accusing them of being sexist/racist.

I looked back through their recent tweets and there was another tweet by someone promoting their favourite developers. Not only did the SJW Podcasters claim it was sexist, but they also suggested they were unethical by just promoting their friends and not mentioning that fact. Now, that is quite a good point. If there is bias and you are promoting something with a commercial interest, then you should declare it. Promoting Twitter profiles is debatable because if you are promoting developers, then you are indirectly promoting their services (books, lessons, website, consulting etc). Now here is the hypocrisy… You can go to a popular book reviewing website, view the books that have been written by the SJW Podcasters and what do you see? 5 star reviews from each other without declaring that they are best friends with the author. Surely they got the book for free, and since they hadn’t declared it; that is against the website’s terms and conditions.

So let’s return to the “cancel culture” story. Additionally, on one of the posts I read that day, this tweet from well-regarded developer “Uncle Bob” was quoted.

Despite Uncle Bob stating that you should only judge the code by the quality of it, and not the author’s background, you can see the negative replies to it. There are replies telling him he “is wrong”, “please delete your account” etc.

What the hell.

I even saw one of the SJW Podcasters’ followers suggest that their next target should be Uncle Bob because that tweet “is racist” and he needs to be canceled. No dude, it is literally the opposite case.

I just don’t understand what people are thinking. People are so obsessed with being politically correct, that they are then attacking and abusing people…which is completely against what they are fighting against:

  • They want inclusivity, so they promote exclusivity.
  • They want people to treat each other with respect, so they promote abuse.

Anyone that doesn’t agree with them is declared “part of the problem”.

After the “dust has settled”, one of the SJW Podcasters’ tweets “A little kindness goes a long way”, another tweets “Take care of each other.”

Practice what you preach. Lead by example. Call out toxic behaviour (but definitely make sure it is toxic). Don’t be a hypocrite.